Technology

"Remove"

meta will still develop new facial recognition code behind the scenes

Wait...does this mean every time someone wearing a meta glass looked at me...rather its camera looked at me, meta stored my face for profiling purposes regardless of me being an user of meta Apps or not?? This is so messed up. Initially I thought that only friends of meta users used to get profiled via face recognition....wtf..but again it's meta...violated multiple privacy laws and as such....so not a surprise tbh

Meta deserves all the scrutiny and scorn it is getting for this terrible project. You know who else deserves scorn? Ray-ban. They hitched their brand to this bullshit and should be held just as accountable.

The starkest signal of the MAGAfication of Silicon Valley isn't this fairly par-for-the-course spyware tech, but their public response.

A short couple of years ago they would have downplayed the whole thing and peppered a few apologies in, but these days the standard response is attack, attack, attack. Call the journalist a liar, call the journal failing, no need for evidence on either, just as long as you keep attacking.

Facebook parent company denies creating a book of faces.

Listen Meta, all you have to do is make the technology free and available to everyone, prove you aren't motivated by profit, use your vast wealth and resources to improve society, and be completely transparent with all your business interactions. Then you wouldn't be getting all this hate

Meta’s Vice President of Communications Andy Stone complained that Wired waited until the fourth paragraph to note the facial recognition feature was “not enabled,” and doesn’t note until the 16th paragraph that the feature is exploratory.

Why is the code pushes to the customer downloadable app of its an internal experiment.

Backend Meta servers go brrrrrr

if the feature was "exploratory" why are they mad? you explored what the reaction would be by having the code behind a feature flag in prod and the response wasn't good so you scrapped it? seems like you should be glad wired did you a solid by not having you waste engineering hours developing a feature nobody wanted.

When you see someone wearing those glasses, get your phone out and keep filming their face and what they do all the time. When they ask you what you do say you just keep it to yourself they can trust you.

Only fair to put a mirror on themselves.

Mostly just mad they got caught.

Smart Glasses: looks at Zuck "That's him! That's the criminal."

Thank goodness for the geeks who go exploring all the tech nooks and crannies to find interesting tech behaviour. We need you.

Removes™ ... the user's UI part of face recognition?

Why can’t a company do smart glasses with self-hostable or fully local processing?

I’d love a pair but fuck streaming everything I see to a random dude in Nigeria

There are different types of face recognition in smartphones today. One kind is the biometric recognition used for unlocking phones, and can tell people apart. The second is just the recognition that a face exists in a certain location, often used by filters. It seems like they wanted to mix these two kinds, but one is very simplistic and the other is very difficult.

Distinguishing among different people is a much harder problem, and can have a bunch of false positives. The facial recognition systems used by police seem to make the news frequently saying that they mistook one person for another. Those systems will have more processing power than a pair of smart glasses.

That's assuming that they're doing the processing locally. If they're uploading data to AI datacenters for processing, then it's really hard to justify calling them "smart glasses". In the computer field, it used to be common for them to use terminals that sent all processing to a large server, and the terminal itself did no processing. They were called "dumb terminals." It would be weird for smart glasses to actually be dumb terminals.

But anyways, if the processing is done locally, the error rate is going to be high. The glasses would tell you that Steve is over there, but it's actually Doug. And worst of all, the mistakes it would make, just like the police's facial recognition system, will inevitably come off as extremely racist.

So, it doesn't surprise me that they cancelled the feature that would make all of their users be called racists. I'm not sure why they'd be mad about it. It seems like a doomed feature to me.